Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Modern businesses are subjected to increasing numbers of regulations from governmental agencies, industry associations, and from within the business enterprise itself. Regulations may cover any aspect of the business enterprise such as employee concerns, product safety, environmental concerns, financial reporting, privacy issues, and so on. Compliance with some regulations may be voluntary, but the majority of regulations require compliance as a matter of law. Non-compliance with legally mandated regulations may incur heavy financial burdens such as fines, loss of business revenue, loss of business opportunity, law suits, and so on. Accordingly, large investments of time, money, and manpower may be expended to develop programs, processes, and infrastructure within the business enterprise to ensure current and ongoing compliance with regulations.
The management of compliance with regulations is made even more challenging because regulations may change over time. The changes may be incremental and gradual, and at times may be significant. A typical business enterprise may have several thousands of policies, procedures, test plans, monitoring controls throughout the enterprise to monitor compliance and respond to potential and actual occurrences of non-compliance. The additional effort of assessing changes when new or updated regulations are published and then having to update the enterprise's compliance policies and procedures may impose a heavy burden to the enterprise.